In the Time of the Manaroans

Miro Bilbrough

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English

Ultimo Press
01 December 2021

Biography: general; Autobiography: general; Memoirs; Biography - Australian

‘A lost world of hippies and drifters breaks into gleaming life in these pages. Miro Bilbrough trains a poet’s tender, unsparing gaze on growing up female in the anything-goes 1970s. In the Time of the Manaroans lucidly portrays the visions and limits of the counter-culture, as well as all the fearful ecstasy of being young.’ —Michelle de Kretser

At fourteen Miro Bilbrough falls out with the communist grandmother who has raised her since she was seven, and is sent to live with her father and his rural-hippy friends. It is 1978, Canvastown, New Zealand, and the Floodhouse is a dwelling of pre-industrial gifts and deficiencies set on the banks of the Wakamarina River, which routinely invades its rooms.

Isolated in rural poverty, the lives of Miro and her father and sister are radically enhanced by the Manaroans—charismatic hippies who use their house as a crash pad on journeys to and from a commune in a remote corner of the Marlborough Sounds. Arriving by power of thumb, horseback and hooped canvas caravan, John of Saratoga, Eddie Fox, Jewels and company set about rearranging the lives and consciousness of the blasted family unit.

In the Time of the Manaroans brilliantly captures a largely unwritten historical culture, the Antipodean incarnation of the Back to the Land movement. Contrarian, idealistic, sexually opportunistic and self-mythologising too, this was a movement, as the narrator duly discovers, not conceived with adolescents in mind.

‘moving, surprising and deeply tender.’ —Gail Jones

By: Miro Bilbrough
Imprint: Ultimo Press
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm,
ISBN: 9781761150548
ISBN 10: 1761150545
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 01 December 2021
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Miro Bilbrough is a writer and filmmaker who grew up in New Zealand and lives in Australia. Her poetry chapbook Small-time spectre was published by Kilmog in 2010, and she has a Creative Doctorate of Arts in screenwriting and screen studies from the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University. Her critically acclaimed feature films are Being Venice (2012), which premiered at Sydney Film Festival, and Floodhouse (2004). Excerpts and trailers, as well as her six-minute cine-poem Urn (1995), can be viewed at www.mirobilbrough.com

Reviews for In the Time of the Manaroans

‘Her artist's sensibility - she is now a poet, writer and filmmaker - ultimately serves her better than others from the scene, helping her to craft a life and this fine memoir from the rich pickings and contradictions of Kiwi counterculture.’ * The Canberra Times *